Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements

9. Movement Advocates as Battered Women’s Storytellers From Varied Experiences, One Message

NINE Movement Advocates as Battered Women’s Storytellers From Varied Experiences, One Message BESS ROTHENBERG Lenore Walker opens her influential book, The Battered Woman, with the long and explicit “story of Anne.” The story is one of unrelenting physical abuse and personal degradation: There was a long period of time when he didn’t hurt me . . . [but] the more he drank the more violent he got. . . . He wouldn’t let me associate with any of my friends that he didn’t like. He would threaten to hurt me if I did. . . . He used the threat of hurting me physically more and more to get me to stay. . . . He had taken a gun to me before and told me that if I didn’t straighten up, this was going to be it. . . . He treated me like [a child] by not letting me have my name on the checking account, which had my money in it, and giving me a two-dollara -week allowance. . . . Sex with my husband was more like rape. . . . He did some really weird things to me. Like in the middle of the night, he held me down and cut off all my pubic hair. . . . Pride got in my way, and I hadn’t wanted my parents to know what was going on. (1979: 1–9) By beginning her book with Anne’s story, Walker relies on narrative to produce shock, sympathy, and outrage at the ways in which women 203 like Anne are mistreated. For Walker, as for many other movement activists who tell the stories of battered women, harrowing accounts mobilize strong emotions and a sense of injustice while personifying and expressing the claims of the movement. By selecting the “right” accounts, advocates harness the evocative power of narrative and show how the lived experiences of individual women align with their definition of the domestic violence problem. In this chapter, I analyze this use of narrative and argue that through the strategic retelling of victims’ stories, battered women’s advocates conform the complicated and heterogeneous experiences of many different women into the single and consistent public voice of the movement. In the mid-1970s, a relatively loose coalition of feminists, academics, mental health professionals, and social workers first mobilized to define domestic violence as an urgent social problem. This initial coalition and the attention it generated from policy makers, the media, and the public launched the “battered women’s movement.” Employing an analysis drawn in part from the antirape movement that had begun just a few years earlier (Rose 1977; Schechter 1982), battered women’s advocates argued that domestic violence, like rape, should be understood as a product of the gendered power relations in a patriarchal society. The initial movement activism also followed the pattern of the antirape campaign. On the local level, movement advocates established battered women’s shelters and made hotlines and counseling available to abused women. They formed coalitions at the local, state, and national level to educate the public about domestic violence and to push for reforms in public policy. They also criticized inadequate and harmful police practices and pressed the criminal justice system to establish policies that would make it easier for women to leave abusive partners. Over the past twenty-five years, many of the initial goals of the movement have found institutionalization through legislation, lobbying, organizations , and shelters. Advocates have established battered women’s shelters in every major U.S. city and in many small towns. Police have instituted policies such as mandatory arrests on domestic violence calls and required sensitivity training in order to better protect and improve interactions with abused women. Every level of government has also responded to the problem with legislation designed to improve the conditions of battered women seeking help, including, most notably, the federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The media have devoted increasing attention to battering as a social problem and provided activists with a 204 ROTHENBERG means for making their claims heard. In assessing the movement’s achievements , Tierney concludes that, already by the early 1980s, advocates had succeeded in making the “plight of battered women, once socially invisible ,” a subject of public discussion (1982: 215). With these accomplishments behind them, the battered women’s movement, as a movement, has left its initial mobilization phase and has moved on to a stage of institutionalization. Although domestic violence is still a social problem requiring advocate and public support, the movement...